This piece appeared in the Bedford, NY, "Record Review," as one in
the "My Reading Life" series by Elinore Standard.
BOOKS TO MAKE YOU GO ON LIVING
When someone told me a book by Jim Harrison changed his life, I knew I’d better read it. And read it I did, but I couldn’t figure out what about the book meant so much to him and it was not until years afterward that I had a chance to ask. By this time, he was in Hollywood, producing movies, and he had to think for a moment. “It was the family life,” he recalled. “It showed me how I wanted to lead my own family life.”
In a recent "Believer" magazine, my muse, Nick Hornby. mentions “What Good Are The Arts?” a new book by professor, critic and London Sunday Times columnist, John Carey, (available in Britain, but not yet published in the U.S.). Hornby says he “decided that from now on I’d only read stuff that John Carey recommends.” Hornby read G.K. Chesterton’s classic thriller, “The Man Who Was Thursday” (1908) at Carey’s behest and says he even “bought a book by Kipling, and I didn’t think anyone would ever manage that.”
Before e-mail, my reading friends and I exchanged book tips via postcard. Every now and then, I’d receive a cryptic scrawl on the back of a photo of a Carpathian crag: “Go get ‘The Man Who Loved Children’. Run, do not walk!” Nowadays, we have Internet access not only to our friends’ recommendations but also to lists of all kinds on web sites such as Amazon. I’ve described some of the more interesting ones in this column.
Still, there is the rare note in the mailbox – I got one recently from a friend who had moved away – in which she suggests books I’d never dream of on my own. She likes the work of Rohinton Mistry and her list includes “A Fine Balance” and “Family Matters”. She also told me about “The Voices of Morebath” by Eamon Duffy, a little story about “an English village church “. She suggests “The Summer Book” by Tove Jansson . “This is a delight,” my friend says, “about an elderly grandmother and a six year old granddaughter on a private island in the Gulf of Finland.” Such is not the stuff of bestseller lists.
In his Introduction to “Pure Pleasure: A Guide to the Twentieth Century’s Most Enjoyable Books,” (Faber, 2000), John Carey, begins by wondering if there will still be books at the end of this millennium, a time that may be as remote from printed books as clay tablets are from the present. He muses on readers and non-readers and says the difference between the two is the greatest of all cultural divides. Carey says the divisions “…cut across age, class and gender. Neither side understands the other.” He wonders if in tomorrow’s densely packed world reading will become a lifeline for almost everyone.
Trying to explain the point of reading to non-readers is tough and it makes one ask what it is that makes reading so unique. Carey addresses this by pointing out that movies and television look like what they represent and words on the printed page do not. But they can, he says, “represent anything, and they have to be deciphered by a skilled practitioner.” He reminds us this is an “amazingly complex operation.”
When you think about it, reading involves an extraordinary creative process. Carey says, “no book or page is quite the same for any two readers.”
In “Pure Pleasure” Carey lists fifty 20th century books he would like to re-read, allowing one book per author and trying to choose the same number of books for each decade (which he failed to do) – fiction, non-fiction and poetry were all admissible, and books in translation were permitted.
He went, he says, “for less trumpeted and less familiar favorites by the same authors.” He included only books he likes: no Proust, no Faulkner.
This is so interesting: Carey says he left some books out because they were too well-known. He dropped Nabokov’s “Lolita””, for example, Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage,” and Stella Gibbons’s “Cold Comfort Farm.” The chosen titles had to be really absorbing, they needed, he says, “to make him want to go on living.”
“Above all, they need to be appealing enough to enthrall some of the semi-literate barbarians outside the door who may start to reintroduce reading to a bookless world.” And so, like Nick Hornby, (and thanks, Nick, for this) I am listing some of John Carey’s books to live for, beginning with A. Conan Doyle’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles” (1902) a thriller Carey says is, “one of the formative myths of the twentieth century,” because according to Carey, “it has permeated the culture at all levels, as myths do.”
Carey continues with Gide: “The Immoralist” (1902), Kipling: “Traffics and Discoveries” (1904), Conrad, “The Secret Agent” (1907), Forster, “A Room With a View” (1908), Chesterton: “The Man Who Was Thursday” (1908) described by Carey as “the last gasp of the Edwardian summer before Armageddon.” And he concludes this innocent decade with Arnold Bennett’s “The Old Wives’ Tale” (1908) and Wells’s “The History of Mr. Polly” (1910).
The list is delicious as it continues with Hardy, Gorky, Joyce and Eliot, among others, in the next decade. The 1920’s include Mansfield, Huxley, Fitzgerald, Waugh and Graves’s “Goodbye To All That,” which Carey says is, “an anti-war book that displays just those qualities – courage, pride, patriotism – that make war happen.”
In the decade before WWII, we have Yeats, Bowen, Steinbeck, Greene and Orwell, among others.
For the 1940’s, only one: Keith Douglas’s “Alamein to Zem Zem” (1946), a graphic chronicle of tank warfare in the North African desert. Carey says, “Few battle narratives are so exuberant or so sensitive.” Douglas survived the desert campaign but was killed in Normandy at the age of 24. I tried to find the Douglas book in the loal library system, but couldn’t. Perhaps a deeper search into local university libraries may yield results.
The 1950s brings us Thomas Mann, William Golding, V.S. Naipaul.
The 1960’s: Auden and Muriel Spark.
The ‘70’s: Ted Hughes and Ian McEwan.
Only two represent the 1980’s: Clive James’s “Unreliable Memoirs” (1980) and work of the poet, Philip Larkin.
The concluding decade, the 1990’s, features John Updike’s “A Rabbit Omnibus” (1991). Hear Carey’s comments on this sage of middle-America in the second half of the twentieth century: “Modern America, as illustrated by Rabbit’s friends and relations, is coarse, ignorant, philistine, foul-mouthed, arrogant, cultureless, infantile, and sex-obsessed. Worse, it rules the world.”
Why choose a work so filled with decline and fall?, Carey asks himself. “Because of Updike’s writing is why.” Carey says, “Updike is a poet moonlighting as a novelist.”
If “Pure Pleasure” piques your interest, you may want to go on to Carey’s “The Intellectuals and the Masses” (St. Martin’s, 1992), a book (title courtesy of Arnold Bennett) about the response of the English literary intelligentsia, 1880-1939, to the new phenomenon of mass culture.
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Elinore Standard is the co-editor, along with Laura Furman, of
"Bookworms: Great Writers and Readers Celebrate Reading." (Carroll & Graf, 1997). ehstandard@gmail.com
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